Interviews
- »One on One with Ed Hess
Grow or Die. It’s probably the most common business axiom, and the least accurate, according to the new book “Smart Growth: Building an Enduring Business by Managing the Risks of Growth” (Columbia Business School Publishing). To better understand the book’s implications for firms, Consulting’s One-on-One sat down with the book’s author, Ed Hess, a former Arthur Andersen strategy consultant and current professor at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business.
- »One on One with Summit's David Litherland
When prospective employees interview for a job, they obsess over making a good, lasting impression. Firms should do the same. To learn how firms can avoid typical pitfalls, Consulting’s One on One sat down with David Litherland, managing partner of Summit Search Group, an executive search firm specializing in placing professionals within professional service firms.
- »One on One with PwC's Tom Craren
Senior executives are becoming immune to traditional marketing. Marketing consultants tell us that to pierce through the white noise of corporate communication, firms should consider “content marketing”. Instead of more traditional marketing, providing valuable insight and perspective in a blog or electronic newsletter can serve as a more effective door opener. One of the best examples is PricewaterhouseCoopers’ “10-Minute” series. For almost three years, PwC has boiled down complex thought leadership into small electronic pieces an executive can read in about ten minutes. To learn more about PwC’s marketing efforts, Consulting’s One-on-One sat down with Tom Craren, the firm’s brand strategy and thought leadership leader. His team of 20 writers produces between two to three 10-minute pieces each month, along with more detailed white papers.
- »One on One with Stanford Hospital's Kate Surman
Transitioning healthcare companies from paper to electronic records presents huge consulting opportunities.
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»Case Study: MorganFranklin Helps BT Stay On the Money
 MorganFrankin’s longterm relationship with communications provider BT enabled the consultancy to address a challenge it recently faced: updating the company’s finance system.
Challenge: In an effort to drive down costs and improve delivery of decision support, BT began several years ago to transform its finance function. The company wanted to reduce the complexity of financial operations and lower costs by consolidating its financial systems infrastructure and streamlining processes. As the starting point, BT developed a standard, Oracle-based architecture with the understanding that country-specific requirements would result in a limited number of design modifications to meet the needs of disparate companies around the globe.
Solution: BT, which has been a client of MorganFranklin for nearly a decade, selected the firm about a year ago to support this initiative based upon the company’s expertise in telecom operations and BT’s strategic vision.
MorganFranklin had an understanding of both BT’s legacy financial platforms and lessons learned from earlier consolidation efforts. The consultancy provided thought leadership during the design of BT’s global architecture and was instrumental in supporting the subsequent rollout. During the rollout, MorganFranklin helped BT determine when local customizations were truly required and also helped design enhancements in functionality for the architecture to accommodate shared service center processing and centralized control of operations.
Result: BT was able to consolidate the financial platform for its U.S. operation and leverage the benefits of centralized processing by expanding the platform’s global footprint by 90 companies in 43 countries. Furthermore, MorganFranklin helped create business processes and system configurations that promote the swift migration of additional legal entities onto the global platform. BT has also increased the momentum of entity migration onto the global platform—critical to driving the long-term success of the consolidation strategy for the systems architecture and finance operations.
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